China promises change to labor camp system

Jan. 7, 2013
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Li Zhuang, a former lawyer who claims he was framed and wrongfully jailed for 18 months, talks on his mobile phone in front of the Chongqing No. 1 Intermediate People's Court on Nov. 29 in Chongqing, China. Li was disbarred after being convicted of having one of his clients lie in court, as well as a village official who had been sent to a labor camp for criticizing the Chinese leadership. / AP

by Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY

by Calum MacLeod, USA TODAY

BEIJING â?? China's top law enforcement official said Monday that the Communist government is preparing to soften its much-criticized system of labor camps, a decades-old form of punishment in which people can be imprisoned for up to four years without trial.

Meng Jianzhu said at a national political and legal work conference that China will end its use of "re-education through labor" this year, though he declined to give specifics. The system has long been denounced by Chinese rights lawyers and foreign nations including the United States as a way to silence political dissidents.

Petty criminals are also subjected to forced labor, often in poor conditions.

Meng's announcement is "good news and the result of concerted effort of activists and opinion leaders in and outside China for many years that the system should be changed," said Maya Wang, a Hong Kong-based Asia researcher for Human Rights Watch.

However, she said, "the word 'reform' is tricky as it's unclear what reform it will be."

Several legal professionals and activists expressed concerns about whether Meng's announcement is what it appears. Online postings that discussed his remarks on ending the labor camps in 2013 were soon deleted from media websites, including CCTV, the national broadcaster. They were replaced by reports that China will "advance reform' of the system this year.

Rights lawyer Li Fangping said Monday's announcement does not signal the system's abolition.

" 'Re-education through labor' will stop, but a replacement law will emerge this year, perhaps called the 'law-breaking behavior correctional law," Li said. "In name and form, the system will change, but not its core content."

The state-run Xinhua News Agency quoted figures from the Bureau of Re-education Through Labor under China's Ministry of Justice showing that 160,000 people were imprisoned in 350 re-education-through-labor centers nationwide at the end of 2008.

The new law may reduce incarceration to two years, and the procedures should be more open, "but the essence of re-education through labor will remain, and the police will remain the key decision-makers, as any judicial review that is introduced will be quite weak," Li said.

He Weifang, an outspoken legal expert at Peking University, welcomed change to a system he said has not only "violated human rights in China since the 1950s" but also contradicts Chinese law.

Without defense lawyers or judicial review, "police can restrict citizens' personal freedom, and not just police but the whole government can use this kind of method to restrict the freedom of any people they feel may harm them and should be controlled, such as the Falun Gong," a banned spiritual group, He said.

He says there has been growing public pressure on this issue in the past year. In one case that has been publicized, a mother was sent to a labor camp for demanding greater punishment for her daughter's rapists.

China has been looking at abolishing labor camps for some time so the new generation of leadership in Beijing should not be credited with making any change, he said. And He and others say past claims of change did not materialize.

Wang said that four recent pilot projects to change the labor camp system in Chinese cities merely changes its name to "education and correction."

"We worry the system might just be replaced with another that continues to be an administrative detention system where people are detained without trial," Wang said. "This is a positive step but only a first step."